Born in 1925 in Montbrison, France, Boulez sang in
the boys' choir of his Catholic school at St. Etienne.
An early aptitude for mathematics marked him for a
career in engineering, and on leaving school in 1941,
he spent a year attending a course in higher mathematics
at Lyons. During that year he made what progress he
could with music, cultivating his proficiency as a
pianist and acquiring a grounding in theory. It was
the latter which stood him in good stead when he moved
to Paris in 1942 and, against his fatherās wishes,
opted for the Paris Conservatoire rather than the
Ecole Polytechnique. After three years he took a premier
prix in harmony, having attended Messiaen's famous
harmony class and studied counterpoint with Andree
Vaurabourg, the wife of Arthur Honegger.
It was in Messiaen's class that Boulez, respected
and encouraged by his teacher, first gave proof of
exceptional abilities as a music analyst. Quick to
detect genuine originality of craftsmanship, he had
little patience for music whose renown rested on anything
less substantial. He viewed composition as a form
of aesthetic research and demanded that it be conducted
on stringently scientific, or logical, lines. His
own aesthetic researches of this time led him to "a
very clear awareness of the necessity of atonality".
When Schoenbergās pupil Ren Leibowitz began to introduce
dodecaphonic music to the French public, Boulez readily
applied to him for instruction in serial techniques.
Within a year his earliest published compositions
had taken shape; his inventive energies had taken
the route suggested by Schoenbergās Wind Quintet Op.
26 (which he had heard in 1945) and by the later works
of Webern.
The first works that made Boulezās reputation as a
composer were the Second Piano Sonata and Le soleil
des eaux. The Second Sonata is a monumental work,
the reputation of which grew less from relatively
obscure early performances than from circulation of
the score, which was published in 1950. Its 1952 performance
in Darmstadt was one of the most eagerly awaited musical
events of the post-war years.
Immediately afterwards came the Livre pour quatour,
which foreshadows much of the later development of
Boulezās musical thinking. The work is in the form
of a collection of movements, and it is left to the
performers to select which will be given at any one
performance. Thus it anticipates those works of the
late 1950s in which the performer is allowed to choose
his own path through the music. Its immediate significance,
however, was as a pointer toward the technique of
"total serialization". Stimulated by the
last works of Webern and by Messiaen's Quatre tudes
de rythme (1949-50), Boulez sought to develop
a technique whereby the principles of serialism could
be made to govern the timbre, duration, and intensity
of each sound, as well as its pitch. The most successful
of Boulez's subsequent essays in total serialization
was Structures I for two pianos (1951- 52), the first
section of which was performed in Paris in 1952 by
Messiaen and the composer.
Although the next five years saw a marked slowing
down in Boulezās production as a composer, it was
also a period during which he won wide and even popular
acclaim for Le marteau sans matre, a work that very
soon came to be thought of as a keystone of 20th century
music, a worthy companion to Le Sacre du Printemps
and Pierrot Lunaire.
The broadening of his serial techniques
led Boulez to an interest in the possibilities of
open form, in which individual works were increasingly
seen as parts of a greater whole, a "ćwork in
progress", to be taken up again and reworked
as the larger entity began to assume its own shape.
He concurrently came to extend considerable freedom
to the performer. There are passages in works from
this period marked, for example,"senza tempo",
leaving the soloist and conductor free to judge durations
for themselves.
The re-composition of older pieces
eventually became a major part of Boulez's creative
life, with many works undergoing substantial revision
from the 1960s to today. Boulez not only felt that
his growing experience allowed him to improve or extend
what he had written in his twenties and thirties,
but he also became committed to an aesthetic of proliferation,
to a belief that, within the center-less universe
of serialism, musical ideas held limitless potential
for development. Toward the end of the 1970s Boulezās
research facility, the Institut de Recherche et Coordination
Acoustique/Musique, came into operation. His hopes
for IRCAM were that it would be a meeting place for
scientists, composers, and performers--a laboratory
in which the music adventure of the 20th century could
continue unabated. Indeed, scores of composers have
been inspired by time spent working at IRCAM and by
the musical and technological innovations that have
sprung from the Institute.
Boulez's contributions as a conductor span six decades.
In 1946, he was appointed musical director of the
Compagnie Renaud-Barrault, where he honed his conducting
skills with performances of theatre music, including
scores by Auric, Pulenc, and Honegger. In 1954, supported
by the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault, Boulez founded the
Domaine Musical series of concerts, where, under his
baton, new works were given carefully prepared performances
in programs that included only those works of the
past thought to be of special relevance to contemporary
music. These ćcomposersā concertsä found an enthusiastic
following in Paris and set a pattern which has since
been widely and successfully imitated. Although always
primarily concerned with the performance of 20th century
music, Boulez eventually came to extend his repertory
to include a number of earlier works (by Haydn, Beethoven,
Schubert, and others) with which he felt a special
affinity.
In 1967 he became a guest conductor with the Cleveland
Orchestra, and four years later he was appointed principal
conductor of both the BBC Symphony and New York Philharmonic
orchestras. He relinquished these posts in 1974 and
1977 respectively. In 1976 he conducted the Ring at
Bayreuth, and in 1979 at the Paris Opra he had charge
of the first production of Bergās Lulu in complete
form. He subsequently reduced his conducting commitments
dramatically, but by the 1990s he was performing and
recording frequently again, mostly in his favorite
20th century repertory, but with some new acquisitions
(e.g., Bruckner, Strauss).
Boulez's performances are primarily noted for their
analytical clarity of sound; every note, even in complex
scores, makes its point as a contribution to the whole.
He brings a composerās insight to the shaping of structure
and form, and imagination to his interpretation of
a workās aesthetic. This insight and imagination is
also displayed in his verbal introductions to many
of the works he performs, for he has continued, both
in the concert hall and through the mass media, to
be a most active propagandist and spokesman for the
music of the 20th century.
--adapted from The New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians, 2nd Edition 
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